The Community Blog is a personal opinion of community members and by no means the official standpoint of DNN Corp or DNN Platform. This is a place to express personal thoughts about DNNPlatform, the community and its ecosystem. Do you have useful information that you would like to share with the DNN Community in a featured article or blog? If so, please contact [email protected].

MVC Controllers

In my earlier blog I described how DNN provides a base Controller (DnnController) that developers can sub-class, when building modules using ASP.NET MVC. This base class provides Portal and Module context as well as some helper methods – just like PortalModuleBase does for “classic” WebForms based DNN modules.

Localization is provided by two members of the base class – a LocalizeString method and a LocalResourceFile property.

Listing 1: Localization support in DnnController base class

1: publicstring LocalResourceFile { get; set; }

2:

3: publicstring LocalizeString(string key)

4: {

5: return Localization.GetString(key, LocalResourceFile);

6: }

The LocalizeString method is similar to the LocalizeString method in PortalModuleBase. It calls the Localization class passing the key and the LocalResourceFile. The LocalResourceFile name can be anything you want, but by convention it defaults to <<Controller>>.resx. In the case of the example project which has a single controller – ContactController, the default LocalResourceFile value is Contact.resx.

There isn’t an example of the use of LocalizeString in the example project – you are most likely to need localized strings in the UI, so there is also support for localization in your MVC Views.

Dnn View Helper

As mentioned in the earlier blog DNN also provides a default base View – DnnWebViewPage. As long as you make your views inherit from this base WebViewPage (or its generic equivalent DnnWebViewPage<TModel>) then you will have access to a Dnn helper class.

The Dnn helper class also supports the same two members – so you can use the helper syntax @Dnn.LocalizeString(key) in your Razor views. As before you can set the LocalResourceFile property or use the default convention which is the same as before, i.e. the <<Controller>>.resx, where <<Controller>> is the parent Controller class for the view.

The sample code includes the use of this method in both of its views (see Listing 2)

Listing 2: Use of the Dnn Localization helper

1: <div>

2: <span>@contact.FirstName</span>

3: <span>@contact.LastName</span>

4: </div>

5: <div>

6: <span>@Dnn.LocalizeString("Email")</span>

7: <span>@contact.Email</span>

8: </div>

9: <div>

10: <span>@Dnn.LocalizeString("Phone")</span>

11: <span>@contact.Phone</span>

12: </div>

13: <div>

14: <span>@Dnn.LocalizeString("Twitter")</span>

15: <span>@contact.Twitter</span>

16: </div>

That’s it – we have tried to keep the experience familiar to DNN developers while embracing MVC standards. Please give it a try and tell us what you think.

Content Layout

Subscribe to DNN Digest

Subscribe to DNN Digest

DNN Digest is our monthly email newsletter. It highlights news and content from around the DNN ecosystem, such as new modules and themes, messages from leadership, blog posts and notable tweets. Keep your finger on the pulse of the ecosystem by subscribing.